Land of the long white saviour fiction

Rewriting the Story My Mother Sold: The Damage of White Saviourism and Media Myth-Making

Misti Lekimenju with her father, Daniel, in 1998.I recently found myself at the centre of a MailOnline headline: “I Dumped My Husband After Falling Madly in Love with a Masai Warrior on Holiday in Kenya… We Wed and Had a Daughter. What Happened Next Was Heartbreaking.”I am that daughter. And what happened next wasn’t just heartbreaking — it was horrifying.The story of my parents' relationship has resurfaced decades after the tabloids first sensa…

Land of the long white saviour fiction

William Delisle Hay is despicable. He travelled to and lived in New Zealand in the 1870s as part of the larger 19th-century British imperial project, and his 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City, imagines the land as a site primed for imperial conquest and repopulation. He posits the North Island as the narrator’s reward for surviving a city-destroying toxic fog that has decimated London’s population. We have republished this work as scholar…